Torque
by Ananke
Summary: Rosalie and Edward have a long overdue conversation, with dangerous effects.


Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns _Twilight_, not me. I just like to play with the pretty vampire barbies.

Note: This takes place sometime not long after the return from Italy in New Moon.

_-_

_"Sometimes when I'm driving... on the road at night... I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The... flames rising out of the flowing gasoline." (Annie Hall)_

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Parked curbside at the Swan residence, Rosalie Hale taps first one nail and then an entire hand's worth on the steering wheel. She's pissed, and not just because Carlisle has her convertible and she's been left with his not particularly sleek enough sedan. It's called 'restriction'. Carlisle has the most unoriginal ideas when it comes to teaching_ responsibility_.

Still, she can't really blame Carlisle.

No, the subject of her ire presently traipses his way back across Chief Swan's front lawn, fists shoved into pants pockets like the petulant boy he is. She's been waiting for a while,but he doesn't seem to mind extending the walk.

"You pulled the curtain back an hour ago." She says scathingly, as he stops where grass and cement meet, peering through the open passenger window in faint puzzlement. "You saw me."

Edward's lips tighten, his voice low and terse as he continues wrestling with the complicated decision of where to sit. "If it had been an emergency, Charlie would have been up. Or you would have honked and given me away. I'm surprised you didn't anyhow. Learning patience at least, Rose?"

Leaning over, she pops the lock to the front passenger door...silly, lingering human habits...then slides her hand back down to pat the smooth leather seat invitingly. "Sit beside me, Eddie. You aren't my flavor."

A low hiss escapes, but he obeys, wrenching the door open with unnecessary force and slamming it shut equally hard after falling in. Several yards away, Charlie mimics the furious action with the house's front door, the stoop light blinking off coldly just after.

Edward snarls, at whom she can't be certain. "No games, Rosalie. If that's your intention, I'll get right back out and return to Bella."

"Through her window, as usual?" He really isn't obvious...unless you watch.

There's no response, but then she doesn't really expect one. Cast from Bella's presence, Edward is already half gone back into his internal shadow world, his realm of exhausting self-loathing. Considering the suffering that habit has caused his human girl over the past several days...no, months...Rosalie thinks he could at least pretend to change it.

His human girl.

She tightens her grip on the steering wheel, rolling Carlisle's sedan out of the Swan's neighborhood far more slowly than even usual precaution would entail.

Edward doesn't care what Rosalie thinks. He probably barely even listens anymore.

She drives in circles, first through well-lit, neatly trimmed streets, then around dangerous highway curves, further away from civilization. Her intentions...she isn't certain what her intentions are any longer. They_ were_ the usual. Let Eddie have it. Tell him what a stupid, juvenile wretch he is. Tell him how worthless he is, how no smart girl would ever want him.

Only telling Edward he's worthless would be what Carlisle calls 'counter-productive' at the moment, and Rosalie does want him. She wants him with a burning that snakes from her throat all the way to her loins, more than she has ever wanted any human, any animal, as human or as animal.

Suddenly his eyes flicker over, the first proof of existence in an hour. "Rosalie."

Tilting her head up, she meets fathomless ochre eyes, nearly peaked black. "Yes?"

Edward shuffles his feet and looks back downward, but she knows better than to consider it some quaint little demonstration of embarrassment or nerves. Eddie is too much an arrogant prick to suffer either.

At that pointedly transmitted thought...since he _is _listening...his brows angle sharply. "What you said to Bella, about wishing someone had been there to vote no for you."

"Oh. That." Dead-panning the expected response, Rosalie lifts a hand from the steering wheel and compartmentalizes, admiring the red sheen of new nail polish, thanks to one of Alice's recent shopping extravaganzas. According to the little bottle sticker it's called Deer Valley Spice, something Emmett found hilarious. She thought it vaguely crude, but indulged him. It _does_ look nice.

"If you expect me to apologize for telling the truth, you'll be disappointed."

Edward scuffs his shoes again, going distant...no doubt all the way back to a fateful day in nineteen thirty-three. "I made my opinion clear to Carlisle."

"Oh, yes. _What were you thinking, Carlisle? Rosalie Hale?_" She decides to generously interpret the twist of his lips as a self-directed grimace...perhaps just a hint of shame.

The boy fakes a drama ridden sigh, the latest in a long line. "I didn't know Rosalie Hale very well, as you know. Our families didn't mingle."

"Oh, yes." She says again, more tauntingly. His excuses are always infuriatingly shallow. "You Cullens. Always so distant, always so cold beneath the insufferable warmth. You never even tried."

From the corner of her eye, she sees Edward staring as though she's lost her mind. He's probably right, yet somehow Rosalie just can't bring herself to care. For this conversation, she's forgetting the vampire of today and embracing the scorned woman she once was, nearly a century ago.

He eventually grimaces once again. "No one, least of all you, wanted us around. You were jealous...of our so-called beauty, I suppose. Spitting jealous."

She sneers. "Do you really believe I was that blindly shallow? Better a matching set than two unpaired cups. I wouldn't have minded us being beautiful together."

He begins to look aghast in earnest, bracing a hand against the passenger door when she makes a particularly sharp turn. "Teacups?"

"Yes." She affirms rather dreamily. "Bone china. My grandmother Hale brought a set over from..."

Edward explodes, the insignificant metaphor apparently too much. "Do you realize how fragile you were to me back then, Rosalie? Passionate, sinfully beautiful, yes, but utterly breakable too. Even fifteen years...after..."

She leans forward, hugging the wheel, a small part of her still enjoying the strain in Edward's voice whenever he speaks of his transformation. Sometimes it's all that makes the memory of her own bearable, the knowledge that the fire that once scorched her veins showed no prejudice, was no individual punishment.

Still, sometimes, she almost wants to change Bella Swan herself, just to see the girl writhe and scream in agony and finally be able to say _I told you so, I told you so_.

Edward sighs. "...I was barely controlled. I would have broken you into a million pieces, bled you dry."

She laughs, not altogether sanely. "Oh, honey. Royce King tried his level best. How much worse could you have done?"

Edward's eyes darken a bit more, perhaps edging thirst, perhaps anger. "Much, as you well know. And even assuming I could have controlled my thirst, I still could never have given you what you wanted...children. Would you rather I had put up a pretense, lied to you about who I was and what I had to offer?"

She spits venom at that reminder, turning to deliver a sharp, resounding slap. It takes only that moment...that one moment...for the realization of their surroundings to settle, with awful calamity. Carlisle's car is suddenly _too_ fast as it rounds the last curve approaching First Beach, about to take a perfect swan dive over the guard rails toward the rock and shoal below.

The treaty line must be miles back, but it's the least of her worries. Wildly, Rosalie remembers a patient Carlisle recently treated...well, essentially just declared dead...a man whose car flipped and ignited, leaving him trapped in super-heated, mangled metal. Then, as tire rubber burns, she remembers the Volturi, and their vampire death fires.

Finally, she remembers Edward beside her, and begins screaming. She'll be the death of him yet, it seems.

After milliseconds that pass like years, his voice intrudes, almost cloaked panic tinged with the usual annoyance. "Rosalie! Rosalie!" Her head snaps back, whether from the force of the car's impact or Edward's own slap she has no idea. Before she can try to put it together, or just another round of shrieks, he's kicked the partially busted windshield completely out and is dragging her through, even as tiny flames lick from under the hood. Tiny, tiny flames, that shouldn't hurt so much.

Clawing at cold arms and imaginary fires, she snaps back to function, pulling him toward the surf with equal force, flinging them both in, trying her level best to hold him under. When he eventually slithers free and rises, Edward is soaked and his expression furious, but even that fury is short-lived and replaced again by icy disinterest as he turns away from her, back to the shore.

Following with her eyes, she sighs, softly, in resignation.

Jacob waits, as he has always waited, bare chest thrust out pridefully, eyes alight with the taste of victory.

Maybe she's killed them both, then.

Beside her, Edward sucks in an unneeded breath, hands extending to the dog in agonized, bitter humility. "You saw. It was an accident. Someone will come get us. We won't come back here."

"I don't _care_..." Black begins, something like raw hatred in his tone, before he takes a second look.

Edward's voice is cutting. "Care for Bella! Think, do_...Jacob_. Do you want to be responsible for Bella returning to these cliffs and jumping again? Will you be able to save her a second time, do you think?"

Jacob growls. "A half hour. You'd better find your cell phone." With those ominous words, he stalks back into brush.

Teeth chattering from nerves, Rosalie drags herself to the edge of the foam as Edward mutters under his breath and approaches the sedan again, gingerly reaching through a still open window to rummage. After an agonizing wait, he steps back away, dialing quickly. She needn't listen to recognize the conversation. Carlisle, calm, unflappable Carlisle, is going to be _far more_ than pissed, and not just over the car.

A tittering laugh forcing it's way out despite the circumstances, she flops back down into the surf, drawing shaking knees up to hug. After offering a brief look of unmitigated disgust, Edward returns, sinking down as well. "Shall we pick up where we left off?"

"You want me to slap you again?" She clings to the rare humor, even as memory of their unfinished conversation returns and amusement fades into sharp regret. "Forget when I was human and wanted children. What about after Carlisle took that possibility from me altogether, what was your excuse then?"

He sighs, another waste. "You hated us all, or don't you remember? If I had tried to kiss your hand, you would have found a way to bite mine off."

"You never even tried." She repeats, lower, more huskily. "I could have learned to move past my human wants. You never gave me the chance."

Finally, finally, he at least makes contact, elegant musician's fingers dropping the phone and finding her wrist, tightening. "I'm truly sorry, Rosalie."

He is. She believes in Edward's sincerity in that moment, more than she ever believed in anyone's as a human. Even Royce's. It doesn't change things, though. He never even tried, and now there's no possibility he ever will. She attempts burying the heavy, depressed thoughts with jesting. Rosalie doesn't want Edward's pity, if she can't have any other part of him. "You mean you're sorry that you didn't accept an invitation to one of my parents' soirées after all?"

Once again, his eyes sear her. "I'm sorry that it was Carlisle who found you broken in that street. I wouldn't have turned you. I simply would have found Royce King and saved you the trouble of ending his miserable life."

He has no idea how that hurts. He can't. He has no idea how difficult it is to wear a mask of indifference. His indifference is no mask. Still, she tries. Oh, she tries. "If it had been you instead of Carlisle, I would never have had the pleasure of watching Royce die. It's possible that I do owe him something."

Edward snorts. "Of course you do. We all owe Carlisle."

She ignores the unspoken _but** you** and I a little more after this_, another little laugh finding it's way up. "For our deaths? The good doctor might see the irony."

"Not precisely." Edward said quietly. "For all the trouble he's borne to keep us in this life."

She takes a second to think about it, really ponder. "Do you think he's ever wanted to simply...give up?"

Edward laughs as well, reading the implication. "Go to Volterra, you mean? Yes. Less often now, but in the past..."

As two sets of headlights seem to creep down the road, the first accompanied by flashing lights...probably Charlie, with their luck...Rosalie bows her head, for once genuinely humbled. "What horrible, horrible children we are."

Her 'brother' releases an ungentlemanly snigger, clambering to his feet and offering a hand up. "Speak for yourself."

"You don't remember what started all of this?"

His smile fades. "Yes. Yes, I remember."

"Edward." She whispers, stepping nearer, close enough to cause question if not for the blanket of darkness around them. "Don't ever do that to me again."

He stares, expression unreadable for a long moment, before the sound of boots clambering closer snaps the reverie. Then the extraordinary happens. Quickly, just before a flashlight beam illuminates all, Edward bends close, his fingers tilting her chin up, lips claiming her own in a furious, bruising kiss.

Pulling away as Charlie and Carlisle become clear in the thin ring of light, he twists his body to inject a veritable continent of annoyed distance between them. "I think you have a death wish. Next time, Rosalie, _I_ drive!"

FIN


End file.
